The Multitude of God’s Works
“How manifold are thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast thou made them all.” (Ps 104:24)
These words contain two clauses. In the first, the Psalmist admires the multitude of God’s works: “How manifold are thy works, O Lord!” In the second, he celebrates God’s wisdom in creating them: “In wisdom hast thou made them all.”
Of the first of these I will say little, only briefly surveying the works of this visible world and offering some guess at their number. From this it will appear that they deserve our admiration on this very ground: their number is beyond our power to determine, which gives us clear proof of the boundless extent of the Creator’s skill and the fruitfulness of his wisdom and power. That the number of physical creatures is immeasurably great, and known only to the Creator himself, may be inferred as follows. First, the number of fixed stars is universally acknowledged to be next to infinite. Second, on the now-accepted view, each fixed star is a sun, or sun-like body, likewise encircled by a chorus of planets moving about it. The fixed stars are not all set in one concave spherical surface, equidistant from us as they appear, but are scattered irregularly, some nearer and some farther off, like trees in a wood or forest, as Gassendus illustrates.
Just as in a wood, however irregularly the trees grow, the eye of anyone standing among them, wherever placed, still traces a circle of trees around itself, so it would be in the forest of stars: wherever an eye were placed, it would trace a spherical surface about it. Third, each of these planets is in all likelihood furnished with as great a variety of physical creatures, living and non-living, as the earth is, and all as different in nature as they are in place, both from earthly creatures and from one another. It follows that these must be far more numerous than the stars themselves. I do not mean infinite in the strict philosophical sense, but only infinite or innumerable so far as we can tell, or prodigiously great in number.
That the fixed stars are innumerable may be shown as follows. Those visible to the naked eye are, by the most modest reckoning, acknowledged to number above a thousand, not counting those near the South Pole invisible from our horizon. Beyond these, incomparably more have been detected and revealed by telescopes; the Milky Way has been found to be, as was long suspected, nothing but vast swarms of tiny stars, each invisible alone but blending their light together by their nearness, so appearing as luminous clouds. It is likely that with better telescopes many thousands more would be discovered, and yet after all that, an incredible multitude would remain beyond reach, hidden by their immense distance beyond the power of any telescope that the wit and hand of an angel could invent or polish. If the world is, as Descartes held, indefinitely extended (meaning that no human mind can imagine any boundary to it), then what we see, or could ever come to see, must be the smallest part of what lies beyond our discovery.
The whole universe would extend a thousand times farther beyond the farthest stars we can possibly glimpse than those stars are distant from the earth we live on. This view of the fixed stars as so many suns seems more fitting to the divine greatness and magnificence.
But what makes me doubt the vastness of the universe and the immense distance of the fixed stars is the astonishing phenomena of comets: their sudden appearance at full size, the length of their tails, the swiftness of their motion, and their gradual shrinking in size and speed until at last they vanish. Descartes argued that the universe is indefinitely extended, but on a false premise, namely that the essential nature of a body is nothing but extension in length, breadth, and depth, having parts outside of parts, and that body and space are the same thing. The universe might just as well be limited in this way as in the old view, which places the fixed stars on a single spherical surface. According to that older view, the same reasoning shows the stars to be innumerable as well, only substituting their smallness for their distance as the reason we cannot see them all.
But setting aside the celestial bodies, I turn now to the terrestrial, which are either inanimate or animate. The inanimate include the elements, meteors, and fossils of every kind. Of the fossils I cannot offer any probable guess at their number. But if the rule that some thoughtful philosophers propose holds true, namely that the more imperfect any class or order of beings is, the more numerous are the species contained under it (for example, birds being a more perfect kind of animal than fish, there are more fish than birds; and for the same reason, more birds than four-footed beasts, more insects than any of the rest, and more plants than animals, since nature is more sparing in her more excellent productions), then there should be more species of fossils, or of inanimate bodies generally, than of plants. There is some reason to doubt this, however, unless we admit every distinct shape of stone as its own species.
Animate bodies fall into four great classes or orders: beasts, birds, fish, and insects.
The species of beasts, including serpents, are not very numerous. Of those certainly known and described, I would not put the number above 150, and yet I believe few creatures of any considerable size, in the regions of the world already known, have escaped the notice of curious observers. (I count all dogs as one species, since they interbreed freely and their mixed offspring are fertile.)
The number of birds known and described may be near 500, and the number of fish, apart from shellfish, about as many. But counting shellfish, the number is more than six times that. How many of each class remain undiscovered cannot be guessed with any certainty or precision, but we may suppose the total of beasts and birds exceeds the known number by a third, and fish by half again.
The insects, if we include both land and water invertebrates, may, contrary to the rule stated above, rival even plants in number. The invertebrates alone, by the observations and drawings already made by that learned and careful naturalist, my honored friend Dr. Martin Lister, I estimate at no fewer than 3000 species, and perhaps many more.
The butterflies and beetles form such vast tribes that I believe, in our own country alone, the species of each kind may number 150 or more. If we count the caterpillars and six-legged larvae from which these come as distinct species, as most naturalists have done, the number doubles, giving us 600 species between these two classes. But if those are admitted as distinct species, I see no reason their chrysalises should not also claim a specific difference from both caterpillar and butterfly, giving us 300 species more. For this reason, we exclude all these from the rank of separate species, treating them instead as the same insect under a different larval form or stage.
The fly-kind, if under that name we include all other flying insects, both those with four wings and those with two, each having many subordinate classes, will be found in its variety of species to equal, if not exceed, both the kinds already mentioned.
The crawling insects that never grow wings, though fewer in number than the winged kinds, are nonetheless very numerous, as I could easily show by surveying their several kinds. Suppose then there are a thousand distinct sorts of insects in this island and the sea nearby. If the same proportion holds between insects native to England and those of the rest of the world as holds between plants domestic and exotic (roughly tenfold, by my estimate), the species of insects across the whole earth, on land and water, would total 10,000. I believe the true number exceeds rather than falls short of that sum.
Since writing this, having this summer, in the year 1691, pursued with some diligence the study of our English insects, and gathered collections of the several species of each tribe, particularly the butterflies both nocturnal and diurnal, I find that the number of these alone breeding in our neighborhood, around Braintree and Notely in Essex, exceeds the total I assigned last year to all of England. I have myself observed and described about 200 kinds, great and small, with many more, I have good reason to believe, still undiscovered by me. I have since confirmed this by experience, having observed new kinds every year, and I do not think that even if I lived twenty years longer, my utmost diligence and effort in searching them out would bring me to the end of them.
If, within the small compass of a mile or two, so many species are to be found, surely the most modest estimate cannot set the total number of butterfly kinds native to this island below 300, twice as many as I guessed last summer. Using the same reasoning, the total number of British insects will come to 2000, and the total for the whole earth will be 20,000.
The number of plants listed in C. Bauhin’s Pinax is about 6000, comprising all that had been described by earlier authors or observed by Bauhin himself. In that work, apart from the mistakes and repetitions unavoidable even for the most careful and knowledgeable scholars in such an undertaking, there are a great many, I might say several hundred, listed as distinct species which in my opinion are merely incidental varieties. I say this not to detract from the excellent labor and achievement of that learned, judicious, and industrious botanist, nor to deny him his deserved honor, but only to show that he was too much swayed by opinions then current among botanists, who held that differences in color or the multiplication of petals in a flower, and similar non-essential features, were enough to establish a distinct species.
But even supposing there were 6000 plants known and described at that time, I cannot think the true number in the world is less than triple that figure. The vast continent of America holds as great a variety of species as our own lands, yet few of them are shared with Europe, or perhaps Africa and Asia. And if, on the far side of the equator, much land still remains undiscovered, as it probably does, we must suppose the number of plants to be far greater still.
What can we infer from all this? If the number of creatures is so exceedingly great, how great, indeed immense, must be the power and wisdom of him who formed them all! To borrow the words of a noble and excellent author, it argues far more skill in an artificer to be able to make clocks and watches, pumps and mills, grenades and rockets, than to display in making only one of those kinds of engines. In the same way, the Almighty shows more of his wisdom in forming such a vast multitude of different sorts of creatures, all with admirable and flawless art, than he would have shown had he created only a few. This declares the greatness and unbounded capacity of his understanding.
The same superiority of knowledge would also be shown by designing machines of the same kind, or for the same purposes, in different ways, as moving clocks or other devices by springs instead of weights. So the infinitely wise Creator has shown in many instances that he is not confined to only one instrument for producing one effect, but can achieve the same result by different means. Though feathers seem necessary for flying, he has enabled several creatures to fly without them: two kinds of fish, one kind of lizard, and the bat, not to mention the countless kinds of flying insects. Likewise, though the air-bladder in fish seems necessary for swimming, some fish are formed to swim without it.
1. The cartilaginous kind, which by some artifice we do not yet understand can balance themselves, rising and sinking at will and staying at whatever depth they choose.
2. The cetaceous kind, or sea-beasts, which differ from quadrupeds in hardly anything but the lack of feet. The air these creatures draw into their lungs when breathing may serve to make their bodies equal in weight to the water, and the contracting and expanding of that air, aided by the diaphragm and the muscles of respiration, may help them rise or sink in the water through a light push from their fins.
Again, because water is a cold element, God in his wisdom has so adapted the blood and bodies of fish in general that only a small degree of heat is needed to preserve their proper condition, movement, and life. Yet to show that he can sustain a creature in the sea, even in the coldest part of the sea, with as great a degree of heat as land animals possess, he has created a variety of these cetaceous fish that live mainly in the northern seas. Their whole body, wrapped in thick fat or blubber, reflects and doubles their internal heat and keeps out the external cold (much as clothing does for us), enabling them to withstand the greatest cold of the sea water.
I believe these fish prefer to frequent the northern seas not only for the quiet they find there, but because the northern air they breathe, being more heavily charged with those particles thought to be nitrous (the element of fire), is best suited to maintain their vital heat at the level of activity needed to move so unwieldy a bulk with proper speed, and to withstand and repel the surrounding cold. This may also allow them to stay underwater longer than a warmer, thinner air would permit.
Another instance proving that God can and does produce the same effect by different means is the variety of ways creatures extract nourishing juice from their food.
1. In man and viviparous quadrupeds, the food, moistened with saliva, is first chewed and prepared in the mouth, then swallowed into the stomach. There it is mixed with dissolving juices and, through the stomach’s heat, digested, softened, and reduced into a chyle or cream, then passed into the intestines. There, mixed with bile and pancreatic juice, it is further refined and made so fluid and penetrating that its thinner, finer part easily passes through the narrow openings of the lacteal veins.
2. In birds there is no chewing or breaking down of food in the mouth. In those that are not carnivorous, the food is swallowed directly into the crop, or at least into a kind of forestomach (which I have observed in many birds, especially fish-eating ones), where it is moistened and softened by a suitable juice released from glands there. From there it passes into the gizzard, or muscular stomach, where the working of the muscles forming the walls of that chamber, aided by small pebbles the bird swallows for this purpose, grinds it small as if by millstones. It is then passed to the intestines to be further thinned and refined by the bile and pancreatic juice already mentioned.
3. In oviparous quadrupeds, such as chameleons, lizards, and frogs, as well as in all kinds of serpents, there is no chewing or breaking down of food in either mouth or stomach. As they swallow insects or other animals whole, they also pass their skins unbroken, having heat or vital spirits powerful enough to extract the juice they need without breaking what contains it, as the Parisian Academists report. I cannot myself vouch for the truth of this observation in every case. Here, in passing, we should note the wonderful stretchiness of the throats and gullets of serpents. I myself have taken two whole adult mice out of the stomach of an adder whose neck was no bigger than my little finger.
These creatures, then, draw out the juice of what they swallow without any chewing or even breaking the skin, just as (to borrow the Parisian philosophers’ comparison) the juice of grapes can be drawn as well from a bunch where the grapes remain whole as from a vat where they are crushed: “Whole grapes plucked from the cluster, and wine poured upon them in a vessel.”
4. Fish, which neither chew their food in their mouths nor grind it in their stomachs, use a dissolving liquid provided by nature to corrode and reduce it, skin, bones and all, into a chyle or cream. Yet remarkably, this liquid shows no trace of acidity to the taste. Still, however mild and gentle it may seem, it corrodes flesh very strangely and gradually, much as aquafortis or similar corrosive fluids act on metals, as can be seen with the eye. I have observed fish partly corroded in the stomachs of others, first on the surface of the flesh, then deeper and deeper by degrees down to the bones.
I come now to the second part of the words, “In wisdom hast thou made them all.” In discussing this, I will try to show in particular what the Psalmist here asserts in general about the works of God: that they are all very wisely designed and suited to ends, both particular and general.
But before I take up this task, let me say something by way of preface concerning those systems that attempt to explain the formation of the universe through mechanical hypotheses of matter, moved either randomly or according to certain general laws, without the involvement or assistance of any higher immaterial agent.
There is no greater, or at least no more plain and convincing, argument for the existence of a God than the admirable art and wisdom shown in the design and structure, the order and arrangement, and the ends and uses of all the parts and members of this magnificent fabric of heaven and earth. If, in the works of art, such as a fine building or machine, the presence of purpose, design, and direction toward an end throughout the whole structure and in each of its parts necessarily implies the existence and work of some intelligent architect or engineer, why should not the same be true of the works of nature? The grandeur and magnificence, the excellent design for beauty, order, and use observable in them, by which they exceed the achievements of human art as far as infinite power and wisdom exceed the finite, surely implies the existence and work of an all-powerful and all-wise Creator.
The Atheists’ Hypotheses Refuted
To evade the force of this argument, and to give some account of the origin of the world, atheists have set up two hypotheses.
The first is that of Aristotle, who held that the world had existed from eternity in the same condition it is in now, having run through infinite generations. To this his followers add that the world is self-existent and unproduced. Aristotle himself did not deny that God is the efficient cause of the world, but he claimed God created it from eternity, making him a necessary cause of it: the world proceeding from God by way of emanation, as light proceeds from the sun.
This hypothesis has some appearance of reason, since something must exist of itself. And if something must, why not everything? But this hypothesis has been so clearly and fully refuted by the Reverend and Learned Dr. Tillotson, late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all England, in his first printed sermon, and by the Right Reverend Father in God, John, late Lord Bishop of Chester, in Book 1, Chapter 5 of his treatise on the Principles of Natural Religion, that I have nothing material to add. I refer the reader to them.
The Epicurean Hypothesis Rejected
The second hypothesis is that of the Epicureans, who held that there were two self-existent principles: first, space or vacuity; second, matter or body, both of infinite duration and extension. In this infinite space, which has neither beginning nor end nor middle, no limits or extremes, countless minute bodies existed, into which matter was divided. These were called atoms, because their perfect solidity made them truly indivisible (the Epicureans held that no body is capable of division unless it has gaps interspersed with matter). These atoms, of various but a fixed number of shapes and all equally heavy, descend straight down and by their chance collisions form compound bodies, and at last the world itself.
But there was a problem. If all these atoms descended straight down with equal speed, as their own doctrine required (being, as we said, perfectly solid, without pores, and moving through a vacuum that offered no resistance), then none would ever overtake another. Like drops in a shower, they would always keep the same distance apart, so there could be no collision or joining together, and consequently nothing would ever be created. Partly to avoid this ruinous consequence, and partly to account for free will (which they affirmed, against the fatalism of Democritus), the Epicureans absurdly invented a “swerve” in some of these atoms, without any shadow of reasoning behind it.
Lucretius records the first of these two motives in On the Nature of Things, Book 2:
Lucretius gives the second motive for this invented “swerve” of atoms in these further lines from Book 2:
I cannot better expose the folly and unreasonableness of this ungrounded invention than by quoting Cicero, at the start of his first book On the Ends of Good and Evil. This declination, he says, is childishly invented, and even so it solves nothing and achieves nothing the Epicureans wanted.
First, they say the atoms decline, yet give no reason why. Nothing is more shameful for a natural philosopher than to assert that something happens without a cause, or to give no reason for it. Besides, this contradicts their own hypothesis, drawn from observation, that all weights naturally move straight downward.
Second, even supposing this declination were real, it would still not achieve what they intend. Either all the atoms decline, in which case there would be no more collision than if they fell straight down, or only some decline while others fall straight, which absurdly assigns different behavior to atoms that are all supposedly of the same nature and solidity.
Cicero also mocks this notion sharply in his book On Fate: What cause in nature turns the atoms aside? Do they cast lots among themselves to decide which shall decline and which shall not? Why do they decline the smallest possible distance, and not a greater one? Why not two or three of the smallest units rather than one? As Cicero puts it, “to wish this were so is not to argue for it.” The atom is not diverted by any outside force, no cause can be imagined in the vacuum through which it travels that would keep it from moving straight, and nothing changes in the atom itself that would stop it from keeping the motion natural to it by virtue of its weight.
As for the whole atomic hypothesis, whether Epicurean or Democritean, I need not spend time refuting it myself. This has already been done thoroughly and well by many learned men, especially Dr. Cudworth in his Intellectual System of the Universe, and the late Bishop of Worcester, Dr. Stillingfleet, in his Origines Sacrae. But I cannot pass over Cicero’s own refutation, found in the work already quoted and in the first and second books of On the Nature of the Gods, since it serves well as a general introduction to what follows.
Such a turbulent jumble of atoms, Cicero says, could never “produce this ordered beauty of the world,” could never compose so well-ordered and beautiful a structure as the world, which is why both the Greek and Latin words for “world” derive from terms meaning ornament and neatness. He puts it even more fully and fittingly in his second book On the Nature of the Gods: if the works of nature are better, more exact, and more perfect than the works of art, and art achieves nothing without reason, then the works of nature cannot be thought to occur without reason either. Is it not absurd that when you see a statue or a fine painting, you readily acknowledge that art produced it? When you see a ship’s course upon the water, you do not doubt that its motion is guided by reason and skill. When you look at a sundial or a clock, you understand at once that the hours are shown by design, not by chance.
Yet would you imagine or believe that the world, which contains all these arts and craftsmen within it, was made without any plan or reason at all?
If someone carried into Scythia or Britain a sphere like the one our friend Posidonius recently built, each of whose rotations reproduced exactly what we see the sun, moon, and five planets doing every day and night in the heavens, which of those so-called barbarians would doubt that the sphere was built by reason and skill? It would be astonishing indeed to find any man so foolish, so abandoned by reason, as to convince himself that this most beautiful and ordered world could have been produced by the chance collision of atoms.
Anyone who can bring himself to believe this might as well believe that if the twenty-one letters of the alphabet were cast, say, in gold or some other metal, shaken and mixed together, and thrown down from a great height, they would land arranged so that a man could read Ennius’s Annals in them. In truth it would be a remarkable stroke of luck to find even a single verse of it among the scattered letters. For if a chance collision of atoms could make an entire world, why has it never made, anywhere on earth, a temple, a gallery, a portico, a house, or a city? No one does or could believe such a thing. If any of us were cast upon a desolate island and found there a magnificent palace, skillfully built according to the finest rules of architecture and elegantly furnished, it would never occur to him that an earthquake or the chance jumbling of its materials had produced it, or that it had simply stood there since the world began or since atoms first cohered.
He would conclude at once that some intelligent architect had been at work, and that what he saw was the product of that architect’s skill.
Or suppose he found there a single sheet of parchment or paper, bearing a letter or a speech written with deep thought, in fitting and meaningful words, adorned with elegant style. It would be beyond any power of persuasion to convince him that this had come from the careless strokes of an unguided pen, the random spattering of ink, or the lucky scattering of so many letters by chance. The evidence before his eyes would convince him at once that not merely a man, but a scholar, had been there.
The Cartesian Hypothesis Considered and Censured
Having rejected the atheistic hypothesis of Epicurus and Democritus, I should now move to give particular instances of the art and wisdom that appear clearly in the several parts and members of the universe. From these we may justly draw the Psalmist’s general conclusion: (Ps 104:24), “In wisdom hast thou made them all.” But there is a sort of professed Theists, namely Monsieur Descartes and his followers, who try to disarm us of this decisive weapon. They attempt to evacuate and destroy the argument that has, in every age, so successfully demonstrated God’s existence, enforced belief in a Deity, and convinced and silenced atheistic objectors. They do this in two ways.
First, they exclude and banish all consideration of final causes from natural philosophy, on the pretense that every one of them is undiscoverable by us, and that it is rash and arrogant for us to think we can find out God’s purposes and share in his counsels. As Descartes puts it in his Meditations: “for this reason alone I think that whole class of causes commonly sought from final ends has no use in physics, for I cannot without rashness suppose myself able to discover the ends of God.” And again, in his Principles of Philosophy: “we admit no reasons at all concerning natural things drawn from the end that God or Nature proposed to themselves in making them, because we ought not to claim so much for ourselves as to suppose we can share in his counsels.” He states this even more plainly in his fourth reply, to Gassendus’s objections: “nor can it be imagined that some of God’s ends are more evident than others, for all lie equally hidden in the unsearchable depth of his wisdom.”
That honorable and excellent person Mr. Boyle has fully examined and refuted this confident assertion of Descartes, in his Disquisition about the Final Causes of Natural Things, Section 1, from page 10 to the end. So I need not say much here, only this in brief: the claim seems to me false and harmful, since it detracts from God’s glory and undermines belief in a Deity.
First, consider that the eye serves man and all animals for the use of vision, which, given how they are formed, is so necessary to them that they could not live without it. God Almighty knew this would be so, and the eye is so admirably fitted and adapted to this use that all the wit and skill of men and angels could not have designed it better, if as well. It would therefore be highly absurd and unreasonable to claim either that it was not designed for this use at all, or that man cannot possibly know whether it was.
Second, how can man give thanks and praise to God for his limbs and senses, and for the creatures that serve his sustenance, if he cannot be sure they were made for him in any respect? Indeed, it would then be just as likely that they were not, and that he merely abuses them to serve ends for which they were never intended.
Third, this opinion, as I noted before, undoes the best means we have of demonstrating the being of a Deity. It leaves us no other demonstrative proof but the one taken from the innate idea, which, even if it counts as a demonstration, is an obscure one. It fails to satisfy many learned people themselves, and it is too subtle and metaphysical to be grasped by ordinary minds, and so has no power to persuade or convince them.
Second, they try to evacuate and cancel our great argument by claiming to explain all the phenomena of nature, and to account for the production and shaping of the universe and everything in it, celestial and terrestrial, animate and inanimate, animals included, through a slight hypothesis about matter being divided and moved in a certain way. This hypothesis appears in Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy, Part 2. He supposes that all the matter of this visible world was first divided by God into parts nearly equal to one another, of a middling size, roughly the size of those that now compose the heavenly bodies. Together these had as much motion as is now found in the world, and each was set moving individually about its own center and among the others, so as to form a fluid body. Many of them together, as if in company, moved about various other points, spaced apart from one another and arranged just as the centers of the fixed stars now are.
On this view, God had nothing more to do than create the matter, divide it into parts, and set it moving according to a few laws; the world and all its creatures would then produce themselves.
To refute this hypothesis, I might simply refer the reader to Dr. Cudworth’s System, pages 603 and 604. But for the reader’s convenience I will quote his words directly: “God, meanwhile, stands by as an idle spectator of this ‘sportful dance of atoms’ and its various results. These mechanical theists have here quite outdone the atomic theists themselves, being far more extravagant than they ever were. The professed atheists never dared claim that this regular system of things resulted from the chance motions of atoms right from the start, before those motions had, over a long time, produced many other inept combinations and nonsensical arrangements of the whole. They also supposed that the regularity of things in this world would not always last, but that confusion and disorder would eventually break in again. They held, moreover, that besides our world there exist, at this very moment, countless other worlds that are irregular, and that only one in a thousand, or ten thousand, of the infinite worlds has such regularity as ours.
“The reason for all this was the commonly accepted notion, as Aristotle put it, that none of the things that arise from fortune or chance always turn out the same way. But our mechanical theists insist that their atoms never once fumbled in these motions, never produced any inept system or incongruous form at all, but from the very first arranged themselves so orderly, methodically, and precisely that they could not possibly have done better had they been guided by the most perfect wisdom. In this way these atomic theists utterly destroy the grand argument for a God drawn from the phenomenon of the artificial frame of things, an argument insisted on in every age and one that commonly makes the strongest impression of any other on the minds of men. Meanwhile the atheists laugh up their sleeves, not a little pleased to see the cause of theism thus betrayed by its own professed friends and defenders, the grand argument for it entirely undercut by them, and their work done, as it were, for them.
“This shows the greatest insensibility of mind, or sheer stupidity, in these pretended theists: they take no notice at all of the regular and artificial frame of things, nor of the marks of divine art and wisdom stamped upon them, and look upon the world and things of nature with no better eyes than oxen and horses do. There are, moreover, many phenomena in nature which lie partly beyond the reach of mechanical powers and partly contrary to them, and therefore can never be explained by mechanism alone, but only by final causes and some vital principle. Examples include gravity, or the tendency of bodies downward; the motion of the diaphragm in breathing; and the systole and diastole of the heart, which is nothing but a muscular constriction and relaxation, and so is not mechanical but vital.
“We might add, among many others, the intersection of the planes of the equator and the ecliptic, that is, the earth’s daily rotation on an axis that is neither parallel to the ecliptic’s axis nor perpendicular to its plane. Descartes imagined that our earth was once a sun, and so was itself the center of a smaller vortex whose axis was fixed in this direction, kept so because straight particles found no fit pores or channels for passage through it except in this one line. Yet he himself admits that since these two motions of the earth, the annual and the daily, would be far more conveniently carried out on parallel axes, mechanical law should have drawn them ever closer together over time, until the axes of equator and ecliptic became parallel. This has not happened. Nor, by the best judgment and observation of astronomers over the last two thousand years, have the axes drawn any nearer together.
“So the persistence of these two motions of the earth on non-parallel axes can be explained only by a final and mental cause: it was simply best that it should be so, since the variety of the seasons depends on it.
“But the greatest of all these particular phenomena is the formation and organization of the bodies of animals, which display such variety and intricacy that mechanist philosophers, wholly unable to account for them from the mere necessary motion of matter unguided by mind toward ends, wisely break off their system at just the point where they should explain animals, and leave the matter untouched altogether. There is, it is true, a posthumous work attributed to Descartes, titled De la Formation du Fœtus, which makes some pretense of explaining all this by chance mechanism. But its theory rests entirely on a false supposition, one sufficiently refuted by our own Harvey in his book on generation: that the seed materially enters into the composition of the egg. The theory is throughout weak and questionable. It does not account at all for the differences among various animals, nor does it offer any reason why an animal of one species could not be formed from the seed of another.”
That is Dr. Cudworth’s account, and I agree with him on the main point.
I will only add that natural philosophers, when they try to explain the works of nature from principles they have already decided on, are usually badly mistaken and refuted by experience. Descartes himself, dealing with a matter lying right before the senses, far easier to investigate than the formation of the world, that is, the pulse of the heart, attributed it to a boiling and sudden expansion of the blood in its ventricles, comparing it to milk which, heated to a certain degree, suddenly flushes up and boils over the vessel all at once. He supposed this boiling might be caused either by a nitro-sulphurous ferment lodged especially in the left ventricle, which mixing with the blood produces a boiling like that seen when chemical liquors are combined (oil of vitriol and dissolved salt of tartar, for instance), or by the vital flame warming and boiling the blood. But this notion of his is contrary to both reason and experience.
First, it is quite unreasonable to imagine that the cool venous blood could be heated to such a high degree in so short a time as the interval between two pulses, less than a sixth of a minute.
Second, in cold-blooded animals, eels for example, the heart will keep beating for many hours after being removed from the body, even after the ventricle has been opened and all the blood squeezed out.
Third, the fibers making up the walls of the ventricles run in spiral lines from the tip to the base of the heart, some one way and some the opposite, which clearly shows that the systole of the heart is nothing but a muscular constriction, as a purse is closed by pulling its strings from opposite sides. This is confirmed by experience: if the tip of the heart is cut off and a finger is pushed into one of the ventricles, the finger will be felt to be distinctly pinched by the walls of the ventricle at every systole.
For a full refutation of Descartes’s notion, I refer the reader to Dr. Lower’s treatise De Corde, chapter 2. Descartes’s rules for how motion is transferred from one moving body to another, whether moving or at rest, have mostly been found false by experiment, as those who have tested them affirm.
Dr. Cudworth holds that the pulse of the heart is not a mechanical but a vital motion, and this seems probable to me, because it is not under the command of the will. We are not conscious of any power to start or stop it; it goes on and continues without our knowledge or notice. Nor can it be caused by the impulse of any external mover, unless that mover is heat. But how could spirit, merely agitated by heat and unguided by any vital principle, produce such a regular, reciprocal motion? If the position the heart and its fibers take in diastole is most natural to them, as it seems to be, why does the heart then contract itself again instead of resting in that position? And if it is contracted once in systole by the inflow of the spirits, why, since the spirits keep flowing in without hindrance, does it not simply stay contracted? The systole seems to resemble the forcible bending of a spring, and the diastole its springing back to its natural position.
What is the driving force, the principal cause, behind this back-and-forth motion? What directs and regulates the motions of the spirits? Being merely dull, senseless matter, they cannot by themselves sustain any regular and constant motion without the guidance and regulation of some intelligent being.
You may ask what agent I would credit with producing this. It cannot be the sensitive soul, since that is indivisible, yet the heart, when wholly separated from the body in some animals, continues to pulse for a considerable time. Indeed, even after it has fully stopped, it can sometimes be made to beat again by applying warm spittle, or by gently pricking it with a pin or needle. My answer is that in these cases, scattered spirits remaining in the heart may, for a time, be agitated by heat and cause these faint pulsations, though I would rather attribute them to a plastic nature, or vital principle, of the same kind that must also account for the growth of plants.
But to continue: neither can I fully accept the hypothesis of that honorable and deservedly famous author I mentioned earlier, which I find in his Free Enquiry into the Vulgar Notion of Nature, page 77-78, stated in these words. “I think it probable that the great and wise Author of Things, when he first formed the universe and undifferentiated matter into the world, set its parts into various motions, by which they were necessarily divided into countless portions differing in bulk, shape, and position relative to one another. By his infinite wisdom and power he so guided and governed the motions of these parts at the beginning of things that (whether in a shorter or longer time, reason cannot determine) they were finally arranged into that beautiful and orderly frame we call the World, among whose parts some were so ingeniously formed as to become fit to be the seed, or seminal principles, of plants and animals.”
“I further hold that he established such laws or rules of local motion among the parts of universal matter that, by his ordinary sustaining action, the several parts of the universe, once thus completed, would be able to maintain the great structure and system, or economy, of worldly bodies, and to propagate the species of living creatures.” He repeats this same hypothesis on pages 124-125 of the same treatise.
I cannot fully agree with this hypothesis, because it seems to me that an intelligent being is required to execute the laws of motion. First, motion is a fluent thing, and one part of its duration is entirely independent of another. It does not follow that because something moves this moment, it must continue moving the next, unless it actually possessed its future motion, which is a contradiction. Motion needs an efficient cause to preserve and continue it, just as much as it needed one to produce it in the first place. Second, divide matter into the subtlest parts imaginable, and move them as swiftly as you like: it is still only a senseless, stupid being, no nearer to sense, perception, or vital energy than before. Simply stop the internal motion of its parts and reduce them to rest, and the finest, most subtle body may become as gross, heavy, and stiff as steel or stone.
As for any external laws or established rules of motion, stupid matter is not capable of observing or taking notice of them; it would be as unmoved as the mountain that Mahomet commanded to come down to him. Nor can those laws execute themselves. So there must be, besides matter and law, some efficient cause. That cause is either a quality or power inherent in matter itself (hard to conceive), or some external intelligent agent, either God himself acting immediately, or some plastic nature.
Having recently read The Christian Virtuoso, written by the same author as the Enquiry into the Vulgar Notions of Nature (the illustrious Mr. Boyle), I found there these words: “Nor will the force of all that has been said for God’s special providence be eluded by saying, with some deists, that after the first formation of the universe all things were brought to pass by the settled laws of nature. Though this is confidently, and not without some plausibility, claimed, I confess it does not satisfy me. I look upon a law as a moral, not a physical, cause. It is, indeed, only a notional thing, according to which an intelligent and free agent is bound to regulate its actions. But inanimate bodies are utterly incapable of understanding what a law is, what it requires, or when they act in conformity or contrary to it. So the actions of inanimate bodies, which cannot direct or moderate their own actions, are produced by real power, not by laws.”
All this agrees with what I have written here against what I took to be this honorable person’s hypothesis. In fairness to him I must admit I was mistaken. I now see that his view was that God Almighty not only established laws and rules of local motion among the parts of universal matter, but also himself executes them, moving the parts of matter according to them. So we are, in the main, agreed, differing chiefly about the agent that executes those laws, which he holds to be God himself acting immediately, and I hold to be a plastic nature, for the reasons given by Dr. Cudworth in his System (page 149). These reasons are: first, that the former view, according to common understanding, would make divine providence laborious, anxious, and distracted, making belief in it harder to accept and giving advantage to atheists.
Second, it is not fitting, with respect to God, that he should do everything with his own hand, immediately performing every meanest and most trifling task himself like a drudge, without employing any inferior or subordinate minister. These two reasons are plausible but not compelling; the two that follow carry greater force. Third, the slow and gradual process seen in the generation of things would seem an empty, idle pretense, or trifling formality, if the agent were omnipotent. Fourth, the errors and blunders committed when matter is unfit or resistant, as in monstrous births, argue that the agent is not irresistible, and that Nature, like human art, is not incapable of sometimes being frustrated and disappointed by the unsuitability of matter. An omnipotent agent, by contrast, would always do its work infallibly and irresistibly; no stubbornness or unsuitability of matter could ever hinder such an agent or make him bungle or fumble at anything.
That is Dr. Cudworth’s reasoning.
For my own part, I would have no hesitation in attributing the formation of plants, their growth and nutrition, to the vegetable soul within them, and likewise the formation of animals to the vegetative power of their souls, except for one difficulty. Segments and cuttings of some plants, even the smallest chips and fragments of their body, branches, or roots, will grow and become perfect plants themselves. This means that the vegetable soul, if it were the architect, would have to be divisible, and therefore could not be a spiritual or intelligent being, which the plastic principle must be, as we have shown. That principle must preside over the whole ordering of the plant as one single agent, taking charge of the bulk and shape of the whole, and the position, shape, and texture of all its parts, root, stalk, branches, leaves, flowers, fruit, and all their vessels and juices.
I therefore lean toward Dr. Cudworth’s opinion, that God uses, for these effects, the subordinate ministry of some inferior plastic nature, just as in his works of providence he uses the ministry of angels. For a full description of this, I refer the reader to his System.
Second, I find it particularly hard to believe that the bodies of animals can be formed by matter, however divided and moved, without the immediate presidency, direction, and regulation of some intelligent being. Consider the generation, or first formation, of the human body out of a fluid substance (not homogeneous, but still fluid), where the only material agent or mover is a moderate heat. How can this heat, by producing an internal motion among particles that differ only in shape, size, and weight, not only separate the unlike parts but gather the like parts into masses or systems, and not merely into one mass of each kind but into many separate ones, like so many distinct troops? And how, within each troop, do the particular particles take their places and arrange themselves into such shapes?
For example, the bones, about 300 of them, are formed in various sizes and shapes, positioned and connected so as to serve many hundreds of purposes, many of them working together toward the same action, and all this contrary to the laws of specific gravity, whatever posture the body is formed in. The bones, whose component parts are heavier, end up above parts of the flesh that are lighter. This is even more striking given that the body is formed with the head, which for its size is the heaviest of all the parts, uppermost. This I cannot conceive by any means. I could point to all the similar parts of the body, their positions and shapes, and ask by what imaginable laws of motion their bulk, shape, position, and connection could be produced. What account can be given of the valves of the veins and arteries of the heart, and of the veins elsewhere, and of their placement?
What of the shape and consistency of all the fluids and membranes of the eye, all working together and exactly fitted for the purpose of seeing? I have touched on this already and will discuss it more fully later.
You will ask me who, or what, is the operator in the formation of the bodies of man and other animals. I answer: the sensitive soul itself, if it is a spiritual and immaterial substance, as I am inclined to believe. But if it is material, and the whole animal is therefore a mere machine or automaton (which I can hardly accept), then we must have recourse to a plastic nature.
That the soul of brutes is material, and the whole animal, soul and body, a mere machine, is the view publicly held and declared by Descartes, Gassendus, Dr. Willis, and others. The same view necessarily follows from the doctrine of the Peripatetics, namely, that the sensitive soul is drawn out of the power of matter. Nothing can be drawn out of matter but what was already there, which must be either matter itself or some modification of it. So they cannot grant that the soul is a spiritual substance unless they are willing to say it was drawn out of nothing. This opinion I can hardly accept. I would rather think animals are endowed with a lower degree of reason than that they are mere machines. I could point to many actions of brutes that are hardly explicable without reason and inference. There is the commonly noted behavior of dogs that, running ahead of their masters, will stop at a fork in the road until they see which way their masters will take.
Or that when they have caught prey they fear their masters will take from them, they will run off and hide it, then return to it later. What account can be given of why a dog, about to leap onto a table too high to reach in one bound, will first jump onto a stool or chair standing nearby, and from there onto the table? If the dog were a machine, a piece of clockwork, with this motion caused by a spring being triggered, there is no imaginable reason why the spring, once set going, should not carry the machine in a straight line toward the object that set it in motion, whether the table were high or low. Yet I have often observed that the dog’s first leap onto the stool is not directly toward the table, but along an oblique line, considerably departing from the object that prompted the motion, or from the part of the table where it stood.
Many similar actions could be described, but I will not spend time relating them all. If beasts were automata, or machines, they could have no sense or perception of pleasure or pain, and so no cruelty could be exercised toward them. This runs against the mournful sounds they make when beaten or tormented, and against the common sense of mankind, since all people naturally pity animals, taking them to have the same sense and feeling of pain and misery as themselves. By contrast, no one is troubled to see a plant torn, cut, or crushed. It also seems contrary to Scripture, for it is said: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast, but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel” (Prov 12:10). The first clause is usually rendered “A good man is merciful to his beast,” which is its true meaning, as the opposite clause confirms: “the wicked are cruel.”
What less can be inferred from this passage than that cruelty may be exercised toward beasts, which could not be so if they were mere machines? I do not see what can be answered to this, except that Scripture accommodates itself to the common, though false, opinion of mankind, who take these animals to have a sense of pain and suppose that cruelty may be exercised toward them, though in reality there is no such thing. Besides, since animals have the same organs of sense as we do, it is very probable they have the same sensations and perceptions as us.
To this, Descartes answers, or rather says he has nothing to answer, except that if animals think as we do, they must have an immortal soul as we do. This is not at all likely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and there are many too imperfect to credit with it, such as oysters and sponges. To this I answer that there is no necessity they should be immortal, because it is possible they may be destroyed or annihilated. But I will not wade further into this controversy, since it lies beyond my purpose, and as much has already been written on it as I have to say, by Dr. Moore, Dr. Cudworth, Descartes, Dr. Willis, and others, both for and against.
Of the Visible Works of God, and Their Division
I now come to survey the works of creation, to observe something of the wisdom of God visible in their formation, in their order and harmony, and in their ends and uses. First, I will run over them briefly, noting chiefly what is obvious and exposed to the eyes and notice of even the more careless observer. Second, I will select one or two particular examples and examine them more closely. Even here, more will escape our notice than the most diligent scrutiny can discover, for our eyes and senses, however armed or assisted, are too coarse to perceive the intricacy of nature’s workmanship, or the minute parts by which it operates and of which bodies are composed. Our understanding, too, is too dim and weak to discover and comprehend all the ends and uses for which the infinitely wise Creator designed them.
But before I proceed, being reminded of it by the mention of the assistance of our eyes, I cannot omit one general observation concerning the intricacy of the works of nature compared with the works of art. I will present it in the words of the late Bishop of Chester (Treatise of Natural Religion, Book 1, chapter 6):
“The observations made in recent times with the help of the microscope, since we have had its use and improvement, reveal a vast difference between natural and artificial things. Whatever is natural, viewed through it, appears exquisitely formed and adorned with all imaginable elegance and beauty. There are such inimitable refinements in the smallest seeds of plants, but especially in the parts of animals, in the head or eye of a small fly, such accuracy, order, and symmetry in the frame of the tiniest creatures, a louse, for example, or a mite, as no one could conceive without seeing them. Whereas the most careful works of art, the sharpest and finest needle, appear as a blunt, rough bar of iron fresh from the furnace or the forge. The most accurate engravings or embossments seem such rude, clumsy, and deformed work, as if done with a mattock or trowel, so vast is the difference between the skill of nature and the rudeness and imperfection of art.”
“I might add that the better the lights and lenses used to view the works of nature, the more clear and exactly formed they appear, whereas the more closely and carefully the effects of human art are examined, the more deformity they reveal.”
